Darius II Sagi
Darius II was the fifteenth monarch of Vicra. He was famed for his progressive social policies, and for the Kenkori Campaign. Early life Darius Sagi was born to Prince Jamshid V in 113 DR, after the Vicran Divide had been repaired; thus, his childhood was in an unprecedentedly prosperous era, and so Darius was able to focus on a wide variety of interests, ranging from painting to military command. Darius grew up with elite tutors, and so he was intelligent from a young age. Diplomatic career In 132, Darius managed to secure a job as an ambassador to the Dorian Empire; this was at the very tail end of Albus I's reign, when the now-senile monarch was mostly under the thumb of his son Yorick. Darius helped to keep Vicra in the Dorians' good graces during the series of monarchs who served in the following years; there was some anxiety that Edric II was building ships for the purpose of an invasion of Kinan, but the suspicion turned out to be empty. When Yorick II took the throne, he was not well liked from the beginning, and Darius advised those back home to be prepared for a possible invasion. However, Yorick was more concerned about consolidating his internal power, and so the threat again proved to be nonexistent. In 140, a rotation of ambassadors was set to take place, and Darius was relocated to Kenkor to build alliances with local officials. However, it soon became apparent to Darius that Kenkor was somewhat of a backwater region, with little infrastructure and defense, and he began to grow bored in the post; however, the following year, Jamshid died, and Darius was called back home to be crowned. Reign As the ruling prince, Darius put his diplomatic talents to work in order to quickly earn the favor of the Vicran nobility, and by passing several measures to decentralize his power, he endeared himself well to them. Recent conflicts in the Saltsmoke Desert region led Darius to shy away from reinforcing relations with Pierroge, and so instead, he tried to work with Dorio's Yorick II as an ally. Meetings between the two, however, mostly went badly, due to the two monarchs' conflicting schools of thought about effective rule. In 148, Yorick was overthrown and executed by Brutus Burich, a character who Darius openly disliked; thus, he seized the opportunity and invaded the Isthmus of Kenkor in 149, initiating the bloody Kenkori Campaign. A three-pronged attack on the three big western cities of Kenkor proved to be useful to Darius, although he found a surprisingly adept opponent in young general Albus Belthion. Despite being on opposing sides, Darius and Albus actually quite respected each other, and held intermittent conferences to discuss aspects of the war. In the summer of 154, the fighting had reached an impasse; Gedging was in the hands of the Vicrans, but they could not make any further territorial gains. Thus, Darius sent Admiral Regnant Moses Genai to negotiate peace. Darius had been willing to cede Gedging in return for a sum of money, but Moses drove a harder bargain, and so Vicra walked out of the talk with Gedging formally under its control. With an enclave on the mainland, Darius set about building up Gedging to be technologically equal with Gratium and the other major Vicran cities. This excited the inhabitants of the newly ceded territory, who saw their standard of living increase markedly in the 150s. Seeing the effect of infrastructural improvement on the Gedgian populace, Darius became determined to improve the quality of life for all of his people throughout Vicra, and passed popular measures such as an increasingly sliding tax rate to better maintain peasant solvency. He also increased education funding, lowered the price of textiles, and made it easier to qualify for marriage licenses during his rule. In the 170s, Darius began to suffer from gout, which prevented him from being as active as he had formerly been; thus, he took to going around in a litter, carried by four highly paid servants. However, he could not prevent his gout from worsening, and in 182 it claimed his life. Personal life Darius wedded Amurdad Turohaiz in 141, after his return to Kinan, and they had five children over the years. Category:Vicrans Category:Sagi Family Category:Monarchs Category:Military Leaders